Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 25, 2010

Google Traffic Stats

Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks. (...) A quick analysis of the data also shows Google now has direct peering (i.e. not transit) with more than 70% of all providers around the world (an increase of 5-10% from last year).

Arbor Networks uses data from more than 110 ISPs distributed across 17 countries. In 2007, Google only represented about 1% of all Internet traffic, but YouTube's growth managed to dramatically increase the percentage. Today, people are watching 2 billion videos a day, 20 times more videos than 4 years ago. According to Craig Labovitz, the overall Internet traffic grows about 45% each year.

Much of Google's traffic is its own bots indexing everything they can find. User traffic, I suspect, is a small fraction of overall Google traffic. The more content on the Internet, the more crawling the bots do.

Bots identify thhemselves, or are supposed to. Bots IP's if not are rather well known, so it's easy to filter that information out of the total percantages if your looking for the end-user perspective.